128 WONDERS OF ORGANIC LIFE. 



CHAPTER VI. 



HYBERNATION OF BIRDS TORPIDITY OF REPTILES. 



Passing from quadrupeds, (or mammalia,) we 

 turn to birds. Birds do not hybernate ; and all 

 the stories told, and formerly believed, even by 

 Klein, Linnaeus, and others, of the submersion 

 of swallows during the winter in lakes or rivers, 

 must be rejected as unworthy of credit. Cuvier, 

 in his Regne Animal, vol. i. p. 396, says of the 

 sand martin, (Hirundo riparia,) " It appears 

 that it becomes torpid in winter, and that during 

 this season it buries itself at the bottom of the 

 marshes." 



We are astonished that Cuvier should have 

 lent the authority of his great name to such a 

 theory, and equally so to read the following 

 passage by baron Humboldt : " The circum- 

 stance of the sand martin sometimes burying 

 itself in a morass, is a phenomenon which, 

 while it seems not to admit of doubt, is the more 

 surprising, as in birds respiration is so ex- 

 tremely energetic, that, according to Lavoisier's 

 experiments, two small sparrows in their ordi- 

 nary state decomposed in the same space of 



